help with preg_replace expression

[vocoder]

I completely suck when it comes to regular expressions....was hoping someone could help me out.

I have a html file in a string...

need to find

<IMG SRC="/icons/ecblank.gif" BORDER=0 HEIGHT=1 WIDTH=1 ALT="">

and basically completely erase it (or just replace it with spaces)

I tried to create one on my own, with bad results

$htmlstring is the var that contains my html page.

$icon_replace = "";
preg_replace("/<IMG SRC=\"\/icons(.*)\">/", $icon_replace, $htmlstring);

[swr]

Regular expressions are "greedy"; the .* will try to grab as much as it can. Which means your expression will try to grab everything to the very last "> on the line.

If you use .? instead, then .?\"> will match everything up to the first "> that it can find. The question mark after a * or + makes it non-greedy.

Also, you might want to use the "i" modifier to make it case-insensitive, and maybe also the "s" modifier so that .* can match newlines (in case the tag spans multiple lines):

preg_replace("/<IMG SRC=\"\/icons(.*?)\">/is", $icon_replace, $htmlstring);